Chapter Nine

EVERYONE AGREED ON one thing – Christos would have been handsome if it weren’t for his height. The olive skin, wave of unruly dark hair and good teeth couldn’t overcome legs that were far too short for his body. But money probably helped, especially with the women he liked to run with, and Christos Nikolaides certainly had plenty of that.

A flurry of police database searches showed that he was the real deal: a genuine low-life with no convictions but a significant involvement in three murders and a host of other crimes of violence. Thirty-one years old and a Greek national, he was the eldest son of uneducated parents who lived outside Thessaloniki, in the north of the country. It’s important to stress ‘uneducated’ here, as opposed to stupid – which they most certainly were not.

In the following weeks, as we delved deeper into his life, the family became increasingly interesting. A close-knit clan of brothers, uncles and cousins, the family was headed by Christos’s sixty-year-old father, Patros – the family’s ruthless enforcer. As they say in Athens, he had a thick jacket – a long criminal record – but this had been accompanied by great material success. An adjustment to the orbit of a US satellite monitoring the Balkans provided photos showing the family’s compound in stunning detail.

Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale floristry business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized.

We theorized that, like Colombia’s Medellí n cartel before them, they had adapted the complex high-speed air and road network needed to transport a perishable product like flowers to include a far more profitable commodity.

But what did a family of Greek drug dealers have to do with my predecessor, and why would he be sending the eldest son a box of cigars at a seven-star hotel in the Middle East? It was possible the former Rider had had a drug habit and Christos was his dealer, but it didn’t make much sense: the Greeks were definitely on the wholesale side of the business.

I was about to dismiss the whole investigation as another dead end – maybe Christos and my predecessor were nothing more than friendly scumbags – when, by good luck, I could not get to sleep on a grim London night. I looked across the rooftops from my apartment in Belgravia, thinking of how the two men probably ate together at one of the area’s Michelin-starred restaurants, when I realized that the answer to our most difficult problem might be staring me in the face.

What if the Russians weren’t responsible for paying our rogue agents at all? Say Christos Nikolaides and his family were responsible for making the payments. Why? Because they were running drugs into Moscow and that was the contribution they had to make to the cash-strapped Russians for the licence to do so. Call it a business tax.

It meant the Greeks would be using their black cash and money-laundering skills to transfer funds from their own accounts into ones in the names of our traitors – and the Russian intelligence agencies wouldn’t show up anywhere near the process. Under such a scenario, somebody who had received a large payment – the Rider of the Blue – might send an expensive box of cigars to the man who had just paid him: Christos Nikolaides, on vacation in Dubai.

I put all thoughts of sleep aside, went back into the office and launched an intense investigation – with the help of the Greek government – into the Nikolaides family’s deeply subterranean financial arrangements.

It was information discovered during this process that led me to Switzerland and the quiet streets of Geneva. Despite the city’s reputation for cleanliness, that’s a dirty little town if ever I’ve seen one.